As the network develops, information has an explosive increase. A pear to pear (Pear to Pear; P2P) storage system based on the distributed hash table (Distributed Hash Table; DHT) technology has an extremely high extendibility, and can support massive data storage. However, in a P2P storage system, a segment of consecutive data is partitioned into several blocks, and stored in several nodes in the system, so that a client cannot consecutively read data from the system, thereby causing a low data read efficiency.
In an existing data prefetching method for a DHT storage system, a client determines content and a storage location of data to be used next according to an access rule of an application program, and then the client reads data from each relevant storage unit and stores the data in the client, so that when an upper layer application needs the data, the upper layer application can directly acquire the data from the client without transmission through the network, thereby improving the read efficiency. However, the executing, by the DHT storage system, the data prefetching operation, must depend on the client, so that the prefetching method merely improves the communication efficiency from the client to each node, but the data read efficiency of the system is still not changed, that is, the data read efficiency of the system is still low.